Apologies for missing this thread! I hadn't been back on the general index since posting before.
Agreed re: Spock and Data. Gnomes in the Dragonlance universe are also portrayed in a rather aspie-like way, as are most of the characters in 'Dweebs' (which you'll have some trouble finding), especially the manager (it's set at a computer firm and is pretty much, “what it would be like to be the one NT person in an office of aspies”). If you like fictional parallels, Kafka might have been an aspie, and his protagonists certainly experience things in what I'd take to be quite an aspie way (“The Trial” is very close to how I'd literally describe my experiences with bureaucracy, and “The Metamorphosis” is a about misunderstandings across difference which make a lot of sense to me too). There's speculations around other authors as well (Joyce I can't comment on, Lovecraft I can feel the parallels, you'll find longer lists online some places). In my case, I usually only start to “get” what characters are feeling in literature or film by reading secondary commentaries interpreting them, but I suppose that's because they don't usually try to make NT motives explicit to aspies.
In my view, the biggest single barrier to understanding someone else's perspective is the belief that one's own experience constitutes reality, and reality is obvious to everyone. There's a lot of counterevidence to this: basically, one's prior conceptual frame has a big effect on what one perceives; this is particularly documented in anthropology. I think with aspie-NT differences, it isn't mainly conceptual, it's mainly sensory: the same sensory input is experienced differently by autistic people than NT people (and between different autistic people too), and this has big effects on the conceptual frames which make sense, and how they're deployed (for instance: I suspect the “concrete thought” issue comes down to the fact that transfers of concepts, rules etc between situations depends on perceptions of similarities which are sensorily inflected). People seem to either 'click' with the idea that there are multiple perspectives on a deep level, or they don't – it's a bit like replacing one paradigm with another.
The difficulties are multiple.
Firstly, we're all encouraged through the language we use to identify our own experiences with reality, because a lot of the language we have available is factual and instrumental. This is a limit to everyday language, particularly in its 'restricted speech-code' variants. This makes it harder to realise that other people are actually seeing, or experiencing, something quite different to what we are, or to what we would experience 'in their shoes'.
Secondly, both NT's and aspies seem prone to thinking “by analogy” unless we stop ourselves doing it, i.e. assume that others are acting in the way that would make sense as an explanation of how/when/why we would act in this way. It's a kind of short-cut: guessing what someone else is thinking or feeling, and predicting (or trying to influence) what they will do, based on analogy to oneself. This seems to work well enough among NT's (not sure among aspies), but it doesn't work across the neurological divide. (The same problems can come up interculturally, and when engaging with animals, young children, and quite a lot of other cases as well).
Thirdly, NT people in particular are encouraged by overexposure to their own 'type', and its portrayal as universal humanity, to assume that other types don't exist or to minimise the differences involved (this also applies to issues such as ethnicity and gender: it's the problem of 'unmarked terms' in critical theory). The corresponding problem for aspies is to move away from imagining that conventional terms and images apply to us as representations (e.g. learning not to infer from TV shows and suchlike that socialising is 'easy' for everyone, including us).
Once we've decided not to guess motives by analogy, we need another way to think about how other people are thinking or acting. The alternative I tend to use, which is derived partly from discourse analysis, partly from ethnographic/qualitative research methods and partly from critical literacy theory, is to try to deduce the other person's perspective by making guesses about the other person's thoughts, feelings and actions based on what one knows already about their perspective – both specifically (from past observation or conversation) and generically (from knowledge or guesses about what kind of person they are – which is where labels like NT/aspie come in). The guesses will always be approximate, but will become correspondingly closer the more details one has, and in particular, the more one 'corrects' guesses against the person's own reactions, against failures to understand and so on.
In some ways, it's not understanding a person in the usual sense, so much as understanding a matrix of interlinked linguistic, cultural, conceptual, psychological and sensory points which form a more-or-less integrated system. I've seen this kind of approach called various names in critical theory – heterolingualism, language as translation, language as allegory, dialogism, heteroglossia are a few of the names flying around. It's related to translation because it's a bit like trying to think in two languages at once, or to translate between languages with different structures and concepts: the way of relating to another person's perspective is more like assuming they speak a different language and learning how their terms relate to one's own a few at a time, than like deducing from a common basis. I also suspect one never quite gets there. I think one only ever has approximate guesses, one never fully understands where the other is coming from, because none of us can get fully inside someone else's sensory frame. What we have is thus ultimately 'allegorical', it's an indirect reconstruction of someone else's frame based on one's own, which at best, relates to it a bit like a map to a territory: the significant points are there, the points are related in a way which parallels their relation in the territory, but still, the map is not the territory. To understand emotionally, I quite often end up back at analogies, but analogies which are increasingly stretched and indirect, referring to different types or classes of experience (being grabbed for a tactile-defensive person is like being stabbed in the arm for someone else).
I suspect that guessing by analogy is very efficient among a core group (hence its persistence), but also very imprecise and very exclusionary; one might say it's 'difference-blind'. It rests on assuming others are, at root, the same as the self, and that language and reality are basically homogeneous between all of us. I also suspect it depends on people being 'mass-produced' so they have more similar perspectives than they otherwise would. (Incidentally, it doesn't seem to be transculturally universal. Some languages/cultures seem much more difference-aware than others). This is also related to the distinction between instrumental and expressive models of language. I'm inclined to take an expressive view of the social role of language. If the analogy approach is other-as-same, the translation approach is other-as-different. In some ways this is 'inefficient' because one ends up having to suspend judgement a lot, and it becomes harder to simply react to what someone is doing. It also yields a lot less certainty about what other people are thinking/doing, even the ones one thought one understood. These, I think, are the reasons it isn't more common. But it's the way to get some sense of how someone's thinking or acting if they aren't coming from a standpoint very close to one's own. Ultimately, I think it's necessary to develop inclusive interpersonal communication and to create an enabling context for difference. In my own case, it's something I almost stumbled across. I think I learnt this method by reading a large number of sources which use it in rather different settings (usually interculturally). I think I went this way for two reasons. The first is that I was utterly perplexed about others' actions until I started studying sociology, when suddenly the pieces started coming together. The second is that I always felt misunderstood, and the development of expressive ways of being better understood was a counterpoint to this. Having once decided I liked the approach, I followed it up with further readings, etc. I'm not sure if there's a quicker route. Critical literacy training resources (such as OSDE) exist which may be helpful here. I get the feeling you're already thinking multiperspectivally, though.
06 Mar 2011, 11:52 pm
